The New Pope and the American People

1:45 P.M. EDT

MR. DENIG: Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. My apologies for the late start today. But I want to extend a very warm welcome to Michael Novak, the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. I imagine that many of you are already familiar with his very extensive writings on American politics, the role of religion in American politics and that whole nexus of issues.

We're delighted that he could come here and talk to us today about something of very current interest, and that is, "The New Pope and the American People." Mr. Novak has an opening statement that he'll make, and after that we'll be very glad to field your questions.

Mr. Novak.

MR. NOVAK: I want to make sure that I am at your service for what you want to ask, so I'll try to keep my own remarks short, which may not impress you very much, but for professors who only have 50 minute-slots, to speak 15 minutes is a significant act of self-abnegation, so I'll do my best to limit myself.

I'll begin with a few remarks about Benedict XVI and if I say things that are already quite familiar to you, please stop me and press me onward. I don’t know if you've heard the cry that some youngsters are developing for greeting him in a little chant. It's based on the Roman numeral and it goes, "X, V, I, you're our guy." But -- and I don't know if you know the new disease that's going around called the Ratzingoida, which is the illicit pleasure that some of us are taking in the unhappiness of Dick McBrien, E.J. Dionne and other progressive Catholics. E. J. Dionne used the lovely line in The Washington Post, writing that the election of the new Pope “petrified” him, which I thought is a magnificent verb for the pontifical office.

I haven't had a chance to digest the newest members that Margaret handed me coming in and I don't know -- I don't see that they have an overall question about reaction to the new Pope, but earlier polls suggested that as many as 67 percent of American Catholics were favorable to the new Pope, divided between enthusiastically and somewhat favorable, as against nine who were unfavorable. Well, that was really interesting because just before the election of Ratzinger, a number of writers or TV spokesmen, McBrien from Notre Dame, E. J. Dionne, Andrew Greeley, even John Allen from the National Catholic Reporter, who is usually quite good, said it was just completely unlikely, even impossible, that Ratzinger would get the election because he was simply unacceptable to too many Catholics.

Well, John Allen had the good grace afterwards, after he saw the numbers, 60-something to 9 percent, to say in effect, "Well, I guess my circle of the Catholics I talk to must be smaller than I thought it was, a smaller universe than I thought it was." So I, myself, was a little bit surprised that the favorability ratio was that high, but I expected it to be rather high.

I first met Benedict when he was a very young theologian at the Second Vatican Council back in 1963 or '64. My wife and I were married in 1963 and took our honeymoon in Rome to be present at the Council. I was writing on religion and so I took a leave of absence from Harvard, and we spent our wedding money and really had a very, very interesting four months at the second session of '63 and then we went back for Time Magazine in '64 for eight weeks. And I met him on one of those two occasions; I don’t remember which. He impressed me even then. He was one of the brilliant young German theologians who were the experts behind the German cardinals who were, with the French, the leaders in the Second Vatican Council.

It was in their ranks and in their schools that what was called the New Theology was born in the 1920s. And what the New Theology consisted in was really not new, but really very old. It was to go back to the very beginning, go back to the ancient Fathers of the Church, the Greek especially as well as the Latin, but the Greek especially, to see how they talked about each of the different subjects having to do with the Church: liturgy, Eucharist, priesthood, laypeople, the relationship of church and world, caring for the sick, rich and poor, all those different topics.

So the other name used for that, Le Nouvelle Theologie, it was called, the New Theology, was “resourcement,” to regain the -- to refortify yourself in the original sources. It's like, if you're going to start theology anew, go back to the beginning and think it all through again and you should do that periodically. Why, the Christian faith is parallel to a science in this way, that there are certain data from Revelation and particularly from Christ, but then also from the Jewish Testament which are taken as data. I mean, those are givens. Those are not something we decide on. And the question for us is how to understand them. How do you make sense of them, particularly when there are things in contradiction with one another? How do you learn to interpret which sentence is used in this sense and which sentence is used in that sense? How many different kinds of senses are there and how do you relate them and what rules are there for this?

That's what theology is, a science of God, but using certain data. And the preservation of the data is extremely important, as it is in science. You can't mess with the data. You can have all different kinds of interpretations and hypotheses about how to interpret it and how to understand it. And in fact, sometimes, the data leads you to the invention of entirely new words which don't appear in the scriptures at all. Just for a small example, the trinity in St. John's Gospel, Chapter 14, you read about Jesus talking about the Father and then about how his identity was the Father and then how the two of them shall send the Paraclete to comfort them, to live in you, and be with you always. So, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- the Paraclete -- will live in you as one. That's what's stated, but it's a strong invocation. Well, how do you explain this, you know, and the abstract name for it was trinity and the notion behind it -- not to be too technical about it, but it is basically saying that when we go to think of God, we should not think of Him the way the ancient Greeks did -- Aristotle, Plato -- as a solitary mind, a solitary insight, alone, living in solitude. It's more proper to think of God -- let me put it this way. The most divine thing we know in our own experience is community, the experience of love or friendship, mother and son, mother and daughter, husband and wife, best friends, comrades in battle. Those experiences, those intense experiences with community, even in a team, a team that has to fight hard for a championship -- people live on those memories for decades -- that those are the most divine things in life, are being with others. And we should think of God as one who is with others. God is more like a communion of persons than like a solitary, icy being. I'm not pretending to plumb what that means or how you can imagine it, but I'm just saying that's the general -- that's one of the ways in which Christianity is different from Judaism and from Islam, is this thinking of God, as in the most divine things, as in some way a communion.

Well, that's what theology is and sometimes it involves inventing new words, just as in science. You come up with these like, string theory in physics these days. You know, you have to remember they're just working from some data and trying to understand how you can put the data together. They invent an image, which, in this case, is string theory, to try to convey -- to unify, in one insight, a whole string of data. But you have to save the data and later on there may come a theory that's better, using the same data but putting it in a new framework. And theology also will change that way sometimes.

Okay. I just want to say that one of the famous speeches that Ratzinger wrote -- each of the cardinals or bishops were entitled to bring with them an expert, a peritus, they called them, an experienced theologian, to assist them. And he was the peritus for Cardinal Frings of Cologne. And Frings was one of the most outspoken of the cardinals, particularly in the criticism of the Italian Curia; that is to say the bureaucracy, which was run almost entirely by Italians at that point. There were a few from other countries, but not many. It was almost -- I'm doing this by memory, but I would say -- you would think something like 35 to 40 out of 50 were Italian bishops or cardinals running the thing.

And the complaint, particularly from Germany and from France, was that the theology on that side of the Alps is so different from the theology over the Alps where they had much more ancient roots. It was much more traditional [North of the Alps] in a deep sense, so that when the Italians talked about the traditions, they really meant the last three or four hundred years, not before that.

And anyway, Ratzinger seemed a shy, slight man, reserved, but you knew right away one of those precise German minds, the sort of man who would, in a discussion about the meaning of something, remind you, yes, that's what it says in Greek, but the Hebrew term is x. And for example, should we think of God as male or female? Well, obviously, neither, that God is beyond those categories. But nevertheless, most accounts in Scripture are of Father or Son. There's a male designation. But quite often, when it comes to God's actions, or God's qualities, female characteristics are used. For example, he's compassionate. The term for it, Ratzinger points out, is a Hebrew word -- I don't remember the word -- which means motherly compassion. It's like from the womb, from the bosom, as well. But it's motherly compassion. It's not just any old compassion that is used. So there are lots of female aspects to God. So don't be entirely misled by the predominance of the masculine usage.

Well, he's likely to do that in any discussion and he's very comfortable in doing this. You, perhaps, have noticed that he's debated in recent months Jürgen Habermas, who is one of the most difficult and respected political philosophers in Europe for the last 20 years. And people who were there, journalist accounts, comment on how relaxed and in good humor Ratzinger was, that these things don't faze him at all. He knows what he knows and he's very clear in saying it. He has the ability to put things in common-sense language or in highly technical language, you know, whichever you want.

And he's debated -- when he took -- he took the place of Andrei Sakarov in the French Academy in 1992 and gave then a quite brilliant lecture, which is worth looking up if you're going to deal with Ratzinger very much. Because he chose as his subject for doing it Tocqueville and especially Tocqueville's Reflections on America. And he makes some extraordinary comments on the advantages of the American solution, particularly to the question of religious liberty over anything that is available in Europe. He's been rather distinctive in a quiet way about that.

It's not common for Europeans, French or Germans, to point to things American as in any way better. There's a tendency to think -- I studied in Rome for two years. And I mean, when you come in as an American, you lose at least ten points off your score and your IQ before they even start questioning you. I mean, they just assume you're not up to the level of the European states. My response to that was to always hesitate and speak slowly on the answer. It's an oral exam. For your whole year's work, you get about a 20-minute oral exam. And if I knew the answer to the question, I would always hesitate and speak slowly and stumblingly, as if I really wasn't sure, knowing that they would then stay on that matter and probe it as -- and so I would -- anyway, it's a nice little game, yeah.

[Cardinal] Frings gave a talk on the Holy Office and its practices, its lack of international experts, its narrow point of view, its lack of transparency, its failure to report what it was doing. And I haven't seen anybody do this, but I think it would be quite fruitful to compare what Ratzinger's practice was when he ended up inheriting the Holy Office 20 years later, with the criticism that he leveled in, I think, 1963, because it's now, for sure, a much more international organization. It's not so hard to find out all the questions that have been put to them and the disposition of the cases that have been put to them, not in detail, but these are often matters of privacy between the person and the members of the commission.

But it's not very hard to find out at least the general outlines of what transpired. So it's always been -- it's a little bit amusing to see the way people on the progressive Catholic left, where I used to count myself, have demonized Ratzinger, God's Rottweiler and the Pope's enforcer and so forth. And you would think he was very aggressive, mean -- and his personality is so different from that, you can't help but be startled when you meet him. I think you could see it in his face, even in the little bits we've seen of him on television.
He's the sort of man who, when you approach him, seems to back up just a bit, just two or three inches. I mean, far from being aggressive, an extrovert, he has sort of a protective feeling, I'm not sure it's an actual movement but at least you have that impression of him. And he tends to listen and he's extremely kind and courteous in his manner -- very thorough, very clear, but very courteous. So we'll see how it goes.

Another point I want to make in talking about Benedict is on three occasions he's acceded to the requests of journalists to sit down with a tape recorder over a period of anywhere from three to five days, no holds barred in the questions that they ask: once, with an Italian professional, [Vittorio] Messori, and that book became a big bestseller; and then later with a book by Peter Seewald, a German reporter -- I think with Der Spiegel -- and not a believer, you know, a bit suspicious of Ratzinger, but that went very well and then Peter* came back for another one, a much longer book. So he's the only high-ranking prelate I know of who has gone to that length to do questions on just about everything.

For example, one of Seewald's questions -- I remember that one of the sequences goes something like: "Do you ever get angry at God? Are you afraid of God? Should you be?" And just -- and very personal. I can imagine being a little startled when those questions came, but Ratzinger gave very simple and very clear answers. And, you know, 'You've been critical of -- you were one of the champions of Vatican II in the 1960s and then you became very critical of it. What do you think went wrong?" And, you know, some political questions, some theological questions, something to do with federalism in the Church; that is, how much -- what responsibilities and roles should be given to the National Conferences of Bishops as opposed to the Vatican. In some parts of the world, they would like to have the National Conference of Bishops, all the Bishops of Latin America, let's say, or wherever, take over more and more of the decisions.

And liberals, at first, went along with that pretty much but then began to recognize that often it's the conferences -- in the case of the United States, they're national, [but] in the other cases they're regional, continent-wide -- tend often to be the most xenophobic and narrow in their view, more so than the Vatican is -- and they lose their ability to protect their members.

For instance, I heard yesterday of a Polish priest who was working in the former Soviet Union and who had been imprisoned by the Russians for preaching without a license or something, I don't know precisely what it was. Maybe this example isn't so telling because the Pope was Polish, but the point is, the appeal to the Pope brought international attention to the plight of the priest, and the priest was very quickly released. A message was sent to President Bush to bring it up when he got over there and he did, and the priest was released the very next day.

Well, because you have the Vatican outside the political structure of the region, you have a little bit more defense. You know, and I think the Catholic Church bore up better under persecution over the last 50 or 60 years than the other churches because they were so much more difficult to conquer. You know, bishops, Catholic bishops, could always say, look, you can tell me to do that but I can't do that, only the Pope can do that. They could hide behind the Pope, whereas the head of the Baptist or the Methodist churches wasn't in a position to do that. He had such authority as there was. Anyway, that's the kind of issue that he talks about.

In the National Review this week, that's May 23, there's a very nice two pages of all the books of Benedict that are in English and a nice little summary, very well done. Perhaps -- it's almost -- it's not quite 20 books altogether.

It appears that the voting strength of Benedict in the very first vote of the conclave was considerably higher than the press was anticipating and just kept growing steadily. It was almost over on the third ballot, as I understand it, and then went over easily and was accepted by a very high portion in the fourth ballot.

I believe it's true that he's a more popular choice in Poland than in Germany, and so let me say a little bit about the state of the church. The weakest condition of the church is in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, which were once -- The Netherlands and Switzerland as well, Belgium too -- which were once its chief intellectual strength. The best schools were there, the best libraries, the best colleges, where most of the learning was done. And it's amazing how in the last 40 years that has fallen apart. There's still some of it but the intensity of Catholic faith in those countries has just diminished precipitously, and I haven't seen a good theory as to why that happened. Progressives tend to say it's because John Paul II was too strict. But I doubt that because the churches that have accommodated themselves to the modern view of things have shrunken so drastically. I mean, the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church has lost over half its members in that same period. So I can't see that accommodating saves you at all.

But for whatever reasons -- anyway, I don't -- let me not speculate on that. But I do think that's one of the great crisis points for the Catholic Church going into the next 15 or 20 years. Otherwise, the Church is probably in a stronger position today than it's been in several hundred years, not only in numbers but in morale, in resources, in education levels, in self-confidence. Also, I believe that the three or four hundred year of antagonism between science and religion has peaked and has started going down the other side of the mountain very rapidly. [We now witness] an accommodation between science and religion. Just let me give you a couple examples. At Harvard, when I was studying there 45 years ago now, if you were religious, the implication in the air was that you were working out some childish neurosis, you know, Freud's Future of an Illusion was the dominant medical explanatory framework for religion. But especially in the medical school these days, empirical work has shown them that people who are religious tend to heal faster, tend to have quicker recuperations, tend less to be involved in depressions. Depressions can hit anybody because they have, you know, a basis that's not entirely psychological, a physical and neurological basis, but just the same. And so -- if 40 years is sudden -- quite suddenly, people are looking at religion, not because they believe in religion; quite the opposite, but because the empirical evidence is so strong. And they don't quite understand it. But it's just a different attitude.

And in several -- in astrophysics, in anthropology, there has been more -- well, let me do it on astrophysics first. The more that is there in developing origins of the earth -- I'm not a scientist and I may not say this exactly right so forgive me on this, but I'm just trying to give you the rough idea of this. The more that is known about the Big Bang and its preconditions and its chemical compositions and so forth, the more extraordinary it seems that the percentages of the elements that were present and the phenomenon itself, had it been altered in the slightest degree this way or that way would have almost ruled out the emergence of anything like human life. It was an extraordinary improbability that the atmosphere, the biosphere, would have developed in such a way that human life could emerge from it.

And similarly, at dozens of other junctures in the evolutionary chains, had things turned a little bit more this way or a little bit more that way, humans would not have developed. But in a great number of crucial crisis points, the turning was always made in the direction that made human life possible.

And so there's become the development of a -- I forget the name of the thesis -- but it's essentially a thesis that it's as if there is a direction in evolution and the direction is in the favor of the emergence of a conscious human life, conscious and, you know, talking human life, which a lot of scientists reject because the whole of modern science has been aimed at eliminating that possibility.

On the other hand, there are just a lot of interesting questions about how the so highly improbable kept successfully being accomplished. That's what I mean by saying even astrophysicists are speaking more and more about a language close to what used to be called "natural theology," what we can know about God in the beginnings from reason alone, from examining the evidence alone, without any theology, without any Scripture, without anything like that.

And the kind of questions that are being asked -- I know one place you could check this out is the Templeton Foundation has been giving the Templeton Awards and quite a number of them have been given to people who are scientists who specialize in the origins of life. And because they come so close to the realm of religion, the prize is intended to be the Nobel Prize in the field of religion. At least a half a dozen of the 30 or so Templeton prizewinners are physicists in an area of this sort. And I'm sure you could check on the website. In fact, they even publish a journal following up on this sort of research as well as on the healing research that I mentioned just a while ago.

So I think there is an opportunity for a profound intellectual turn in the culture, very different from what's gone on the last three or four hundred years. That's another reason why I was glad that the bishops and the cardinals in choosing a Pope went with the smartest -- at least, I think the smartest, certainly one of the smartest -- and I think there's some very heavy intellectual lifting to be done over the next decade or so and if we get a good start on it in this decade, it will be better down the road.

In the debate that Habermas and Ratzinger had, Habermas was arguing that as he's gotten older he begins to see that without some sort of religious theory -- maybe, again, a natural religious theory, maybe not a revealed religion -- it's harder and harder to understand what is the anchor of reason. You know, Habermas is the great philosopher of the fact that politics is based on the rational rules of conversation, and so when we engage in conversations with someone, certain implicit rules are brought into play. And he spent his career analyzing those rules and showing a form of intelligence that we use when we try to persuade one another by pointing to evidence, what you think is partly true, but it can't be entirely true because -- and he points to some more facts or something like that.

And he said he's become more and more aware of the orneriness of human beings to cheat reason and to falsify evidence and to fudge their research. And so you need to appeal to a point of view that's beyond reason itself in order to defend reason. He wasn't sure what that is, but he just said he was more open to religion than at any prior time in his life and he was surprised to find himself saying this.

And it was curious, Ratzinger saying, in effect, "Well, now, don't go too fast on that. Go slowly here, you know, don't leap to conclusions one way or another. You're raising some good questions, but be sure you make certain distinctions.”

Anyway, to complete a little bit of the Catholicism, it appears that it’s the fastest growing religion in the world today. Despite what most people think, it is not Islam, but Catholicism, especially in Latin America, Africa and in Asia. Also growing quickly is Evangelical Protestantism. I think the Catholic population of the world is about 40 percent higher now than when Pope John Paul II became Pope in 1978.

The financial center of support for the Church has shifted to the United States, not Germany and France, as it had been from the beginning of -- you know, by the eighth century on it was Germany and France that were the main financial centers of the church. That shifted to the United States.

Ratzinger has pointed out that another way in which the United States is very important to him in his other job, his older job, is that you have so many Catholic hospitals in the United States and so many people working on questions of bioethics and general medical ethics that ethical thought is much more sophisticated and advanced, in touch with the scientists in the United States, than anywhere else, and to discuss the questions and issues of stem cell research and so forth. There are just more places doing that in the United States than anywhere else and he's found that very helpful. While I'm on that subject, let me mention that in the United States there are 585 Catholic hospitals. It's a huge hospital network, I think second only to the Veterans Administration. It's the biggest on earth. I've heard that. I'm giving hearsay on that. But it's very big. The exact number is 585. You could check if there's anything bigger.

And by the way, when people talk about positions of women in the church, I think we have to understand that the presidents or supervisors or whatever, the executives of most of these hospitals are women. I don't know of any institution in history that has had so many higher offices for women running hospitals, orphanages, schools, colleges, universities and so forth. I don't think there's been a professional career for as many women if we go back three or four generations ago. There was more chance for a Catholic woman to be an executive in a higher institution than I think in any other field. Priesthood, not, but in the executive positions, yes.

There are also in the U.S. just over 7,000 elementary schools and 1,400 high schools with 2.6 million students. Again, that's the largest network of private schools in the U.S. It's a huge, huge number. And almost entirely without tax dollars, too. I mean, almost all of the support is from the people of the parishes.

Despite what we've heard, the number of priests has gone up about 4,000 in the last five or six years. It tailed down from the time of the Vatican Council in the 1960s when it had been about 59,000. It's now in the 43-44,000 range but it's been trimming up again.

Some very big questions will have to do with how Africa particularly fares in development. It has in some ways the most intense form of Christianity, very like New Testament Christianity. Great simplicity, but the New Testament stories of dreams and the meaning of dreams are very immediate to people in Africa, so I hear from missionaries in Africa. Casting out of devils. All this seems very close to life and but it will remain to be seen how well the African Church can move to a new gear of faith and a new way of understanding the faith in keeping with the laws of development; that is, as they become more capitalist, more democratic or modern politics, less tribal, more pluralistic, they will need a more sophisticated understanding of the faith. They'll have to learn all the lessons about how to construct a society that the whole Church had to learn from the first or second century, and the church is very different today from what it was in the first and second century. Because you learn the hard way about a lot of different things and some of that learning will have to be compressed in a generation or so in Africa, and to a certain extent in Asia, that took centuries in Europe to learn. So how all that will -- in other words, will this great growth in Catholicism stick or will it mirror the sort of lull that the Catholic faith is having in Ireland, Germany and France in the lat 50 years? It's going to be a critical --

I've talked on the movement more than I planned to and a little too much, and I'll just stop and let you ask questions, as you please.

MR. DENIG: Okay, let's go to Jennie.

QUESTION: My name is Jennie Ilustre from Malaya Newspaper, Philippines. You mentioned the (inaudible) with the (inaudible) a lot of intellectual heavy lifting (inaudible). Can you elaborate on this? And what impact will this both have on America with its controversial issues on stem cell research and abortion, like that? Not just in America but also, I suppose, in the rest of the world.

MR. NOVAK: Well, what I was speaking of is this, and again, I'm not an expert in these fields. I've deliberately avoided them. And I had a chance when I was young to go into medical ethics when it was just getting off the ground and I just decided you have to learn too much medicine and science and that's not what I wanted to do. You just have to know a lot, as well as the theology and moral reason to go along with it.

And, in fact, in the next ten years or so, questions about genetic choices, parents choosing to a larger degree than before the qualities and characteristics of their progeny, questions about the prolongations of life for, you know, considerably more years than we are now experiencing. In what circumstances and what conditions of vitality is not quite clear. But the whole genetic field is just beginning to open up and some good decisions about how to begin thinking about this and how -- where you start in carrying on evaluations can make a big difference for a hundred or two hundred years. If you get off on the wrong foot, in an antagonistic framework, it can take hundreds of years to recover. I'm thinking -- I think the Galileo episode is very overblown, but take that for instance. The felt antagonism between science and religion lasted for three or four hundred years. And if you get off on a good start, it can make a tremendous difference. That's part of what I meant.

And I think Ratzinger is considerably more sophisticated and had to deal with an early version of these questions for the last 20 years because they keep coming up at the Holy Office: What should we think about this or what should we think about that? Or, more likely, a Jesuit here or a Dominican there or some doctor here proposes this or that solution as the best version of Catholic thought. Is it or isn't it a question that will come to the Holy Office? And he'll have to read through and study the issues and that's what he's been doing for the last 20 years. So he's in a rather better position than the average bishop who's been preoccupied with the questions of slums in Manila and where do you raise funds for this and how do you deal with disease there. The ordinary bishop is so preoccupied with a host of problems that he doesn't have time to spend on these questions, but somebody has to.

QUESTION: Will he be making any Ex Cathedra pronouncements on these issues that Catholics everywhere will have to follow?

MR. NOVAK: I doubt it because I doubt that enough is known yet. But even short of Ex Cathedra -- you know, Ex Cathedra statements are very, very rare. Ex Cathedra means when he's pronouncing as Pope on a moral issue for the Church. Those are very rare. You don't want to haul that out unless you're absolutely sure of what you're doing.

But theology is different. Theology, as it's lived by people, is very different from any other science, practically any other science, because you have to make decisions today and you're making decisions based on theology today. So what you say affects how people live, and therefore what the Catholic Church typically has done is take a big risk and give directives that are more or less tentative; that is, they have authority because they come from the Vatican so, if you follow this, you're at least in good conscience with the Church. But that's subject to revision as more becomes known about the field in question. And there may come to be a series of beta directives which then modify the original one that comes out almost the opposite of where it was. That happens quite a lot and that might happen here on a lot of issues. But if those early decisions are done well, and in a way that doesn't antagonize everybody -- I don't know if you can do that -- but it will make a big difference in the way fields go forward.

For example -- just one thing. Instead of saying “no” on stem cells, if you put a certain amount of effort into saying, now, this kind of version of stem cell research, if it would work, would be very fruitful. You're not destroying embryos to get the stem cells and therefore that moral question disappears. And if you can help human beings with this kind of research, go ahead. If I am not mistaken, that's the very kind of proposal just being made here in the United States by the presidential panel, a method of recovering stem cells that doesn't entail killing embryos to get them.

MR. DENIG: Let's go to Italy.

QUESTION: Giampiero Gramaglia, Italian News Agency, ANSA. You mentioned, Professor, at the beginning of your statement the goals on the new Pope. Do you think that those figures are meaningful or the same kind of enthusiastic approach to a new Pope would be for every kind of new Pope in United States?

And the second question. You made the reference to the young, impressive theologian that Ratzinger was during the Vatican Council. Do you see any consistency between this young, impressive theologian and the new Pope?

MR. NOVAK: On the first question, yeah, I would have been -- I was expecting the verdict to come in much more mixed on Ratzinger. I would not have been surprised if it came in a little bit like President Bush's poll numbers. I'm sorry to bring that up for the political implications, but, again, his poll numbers that were 39 in favor, 36 with questions and the rest completely undecided and they haven't paid enough attention to have an opinion. That wouldn't have surprised me too much.

I was surprised that he came out with such a strong, positive impression. And that doesn't always happen and it did with John XXIII. And Wojtyla was a little hesitant because he was so totally unknown. There was excitement because he wasn't Italian, but nobody knew what that meant for sure. That's the way I remember it. You know, you'd have to show me the polls to see if I have that wrong. But I do take your main point.

What was your first name, sir?

QUESTION: Giampiero.

MR. NOVAK: Giampiero. Giampiero, I wouldn't be at all surprised -- I wouldn't put too much stock in what happens the first few days. It'll be more meaningful as the weeks go on and the months go on. In the end, it's not the same as in politics because the Pope doesn't live or die by the polls. It doesn't affect what he does.

MR. DENIG: There are no more elections for him!

MR. NOVAK: Yeah, there are no more elections. Yeah. But he -- but still it makes things easier or harder for him and for others.

On the other question, on consistence, well, you know, I would say the same thing for myself. I called my book on the Second Vatican Council The Open Church and it's, on the whole, a quite optimistic book about the degree to which the church was changed by the Second Vatican Council. I thought it was tremendously dramatic. I thought that what was happening was tremendously dramatic and it turned out to be.

But I also said -- I took pains to say, on several points, things like I had in the frontispiece, "All good things, given enough time, go badly." I mean, I was saying, "We don't know how badly this Council might go, what kind of sour turns it might take." It depends on how people receive it and what they do with it. You know, it's not magic. And a whole bunch of people -- a minority, but a whole bunch of people in different parts of the world and in different years -- began to think, hey, something's going very wrong with the interpretation of the Council. It's gone on a bad track. Paul VI said, "The smoke of Satan got into the church." And some people said -- Pope John XXIII said that his reasons for calling the Second Vatican Council -- he went over and he opened a window -- was to open the window to the modern world and aggiornamento to bring the church up to today was the motto.

But some people said, that was like opening your window just before you went into a terribly rancid tunnel through a very bad set of years. And if I remember Ratzinger's criticism correctly, one of the early questions that -- I think it was Seewald who asked him -- it might have been Messori, though -- I remember him saying something like, "It was born in a period of excessive optimism about the opening to the east, about the young Kennedy administration, a sense of youth and possibility, the changing from the old generation to the new." And a certain utopian expectation got into the air which served the Vatican Council ill and it led some people to think that the church started anew in 1965 and was not paying any attention to what happened before that.

And they came to be born wet in, you know in an essay I did once, I called Neodoxy; that is, the only thing that really attracted theologians was something new in every field, and theologians were busy by the hundreds pursuing new theories of this and new interpretations of that and there was no criticism of it. It's new, but is it true? That wasn't the mood. The mood was for openness and experimentation. So, he wasn't alone. It's inconsistent, in one way, to be very much in favor of something and then to see it go badly, but in another sense, where to a serious person that's consistent, to use your same principles to say, "This is not what I meant. This is not what I had in mind."

QUESTION: Barbara Kramzar, Delo, Slovenia. I wouldn't doubt the logical knowledge of the new Pope, but I wonder, in comparison to the old one, how much the popularity of John Paul II was due to histological teachings and how much it was due to his -- you know, how he behaved, his appeals to the masses, how much Americans, for example, accepted those teachings and how much they will accept from Benedict's teachings.

MR. NOVAK: Well, if you ask yourself how much in the New Testament people accepted from Jesus' teachings, it helps you to have some perspective. It isn't as if everybody was knocked dead by what Jesus was saying. When he first talked about the Eucharist, "This is my body, this is my blood," people started walking away. And he said, "Will you also go away?" He meant what he said and he wasn't going to try to soften it.

So it's not a very good measure of how well a pope is doing, how well he's teaching, by how much he's accepted. That may be a sign that he's not reaching people, that he doesn't have a knack for preaching and making it understandable for people and making it appealing to people. It can be that, but it can also be that it's tough. It's hard, and they're tilted in one direction already by life, they don't have enough momentum to come back and take that seriously.

Let's just take abortion, for example. In the United States, before 1968 -- well, before 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided-- no part of the American population has ever voted in favor of abortion. Every time the question has been posed and put to a vote, the more restrictive position on abortion has won, not the more liberal one, the more free one. [But] we have a completely free regime -- without restrictions, only because of the Supreme Court. That is, we are living under a regime that nobody voted for, but it's been imposed on the American public. But it's now been there for 30-some years and it's become habitual, and a significant number of women have had abortions and they have a vested interest now in defending it as a good idea, and their friends are sympathetic.

So the number of those who agree with abortion has changed dramatically. I started to say, if you go back to polls done before Roe v. Wade -- I'm doing this by memory and I could be wrong -- but way up in the 80s and 90 percent, people thought abortion was a horrible thing, just thought it was a form of murder. The nastiest thing you could say to someone was that he was an abortionist. That was the worst thing you could call a medical person for hundreds of years. And by the way, this was a Protestant country.

And then it changed. In the last 40 years or so, it's changed quite dramatically. I don't think that changes the morality of the issue, but it just changes the way people's expectations and presuppositions are. So if you argue a strong pro-life teaching, a lot of people are just going to -- I mean, the young woman I was talking to last night at a dinner in New York that's just graduated from Harvard. She's from Nigeria, a Catholic girl, very pro-life. They have a pro-life dinner every year, the Harvard Pro-Life Group, which is about, believe it or not, about 80 youngsters. And they get restaurants in the Cambridge area to donate food and then they serve it and invite everybody to come and things are sold rather cheaply, but whatever the proceeds are go to help young women in crisis pregnancies or to the homeless. So if you don't want to help pro-life -- and they are picketed and attacked and they're treated as an outrageous organization to do this, to have such a controversial things as a pro-life group, this theocratic -- you know, they're under attack all the time. And she says it's so preposterous. You know, they had a young woman from the Harvard Medical Center who was from Hungary and she was pregnant. Her family disowned her and she was alone and the Harvard Medical School said, "We'll give you an abortion. You won't have to pay a thing." But they would offer no help on nurturing her pregnancy, none. It wouldn't be covered by medical insurance or anything. And so, anyway, this pro-life group used their funds to support her to bring her child to term, a lovely young boy.

But that's how much opinion [on abortion] has changed in 30 years, from being practically universally condemned to being vehemently and intensely defended and the opposition condemned. That's a dramatic change in a short time, but popular opinion -- what I conclude from that is popular opinion -- is subject to rather rapid swing in a generation or so.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) in Germany (inaudible) changing (inaudible). If I'm not mistaken, Cardinal Ratzinger, he advised against this pre-abortion procedures like (inaudible) just because it could end in abortion at the end, and this was years ago. And this was big within Germany and this big echo in the public that he's too conservative. So are his views, for example, acceptable for even -- especially within societies?

MR. NOVAK: Well, it doesn't matter. I mean, I don't think that's the right question. I think the question is: Will he be a faithful teacher of the Catholic faith and will he put it in an intelligent and appealing way to the best of his ability and will he thereby strengthen the morale and courage of those who hold to the Catholic faith? And I think what he will do -- I think, quite slowly but steadily -- he will appeal to something very deep in Germany and in France to force people to recognize the depth of what they owe to Christianity, that you can't understand Europe, you certainly cannot understand the buildings, you can't understand what you see around you, unless you understand what Christianity is. It's different from Islam, it's different from Judaism, it's certainly different from a secular society, from a society of the cube, as my friend George Weigel calls it.

And a lot of things about Europe are very hard to understand apart from that and I think he will be quite good at pointing that out. I think that's one of the reasons he chose the name, Benedict -- St. Benedict is one of the founders of the Benedictines, who fanned out through Europe in the beginning of the 500s and around his monasteries, maybe a hundred different cities in Europe came into existence. That's why Benedict is one of the two patrons of European civilization, but Benedict's main idea is that culture begins with cult. It's not just a play on words. The first four letters of culture are cult.

But what you take to be God and what you'd be willing to die for is the most important element of culture and how you imagine God. I mean, the fact that Christians imagine God as a trinity has put tremendous emphasis on communion. It's not an accident that Christianity is the first global religion. It's not the religion of a tribe or of an ethnic group. It's the religion of the whole humanity under one Creator and it's been outward reaching right from the beginning. Such things as the trinity have a really powerful role. Implicit -- nobody thinks about it that way, but they just do it.

QUESTION: I'm Hiro Aida with Japan's Kyodo News. How do you think this growth of Catholic Church in this country, which is rather distinctive compared to European countries, as you said, may affect the political culture of this country which is -- which originated as distinctively a Protestant and Enlightenment-based country? You know, so in a broader sense -- in a political culture and in a broader sense, how would that affect, alongside with this -- well, (inaudible) immigrants -- number of immigrants?

MR. NOVAK: A friend of mine named Richard John Neuhaus, Father Neuhaus – who for many years was a Lutheran priest. And he wrote a book, as a Lutheran, called The Catholic Moment. And the point of that book was -- this was about 15 years ago -- is that more and more, if you notice, the discussion of political and social problems in the United States, by anybody, is becoming more and more Catholic in its roots. And the key concepts and terms in the discussions are more and more Catholic, and more and more Protestants are using Catholic terminology in describing their own theories about society and so forth. And he later became a Catholic, Father Neuhaus did, but I think that's still true.

Now, a pope already predicted that in the 1830s and there were a couple reasons why he predicted that. One is that the American founding was a particular kind of Protestantism. It was a Protestantism that was very fervent as people came here for religious purposes and for religious reasons. It was also very communal. It had a strong community sense despite the usual Protestant emphasis on the individual. What Americans did here was to form communities. So we're not a country of lone rangers. I mean, that's what they say, but it's not true. We're a country of builders of communities and associations. You know, before your children are seven, they already belong to more organizations and take part in more different activities than both their mothers and fathers can drive them to. I mean, Americans just live in associations. And I had an Italian friend who came here, as he said, to make money and then he went back to Italy, he said, to live. And he says the problem with America is you attend too many meetings. (Laughter.) You work a full day and you spend all evening going to meetings. And he just wanted to go home and have dinner.

So now I just have to say a word about what I mean by Catholic language. For one thing, more and more people are discussing the habits of the heart -- meaning the virtues. What is liberty? Well, liberty means the ability to reflect on alternatives and to choose. But to reflect on alternatives means you have to have a certain temperament. You have to be able to master your passions and consider consequences and you have to have sober judgment. So you have to have certain virtues to practice liberty. More and more people are noticing that. And virtue theory is an old Catholic tradition for talking about this. There is a Catholic notion called "subsidiarity," which says that it's more practical and more intelligent to let people close to the action to make the decision, don't try to make it from the top up here; as many decisions as possible, push down.

For instance, just one that's in the headlines this week about a Father Reese from America Magazine. The New York Times said he was forced out by the Vatican. There's nothing in that story that backs up that claim that's in the lead. All the sources are here in the United States. And a later story showed that what actually happened is that different bishops and others were complaining about certain things that America was doing, certain things America has done very well, but certainly, very badly. They tended to treat positions of the Catholic Church on stem cells or whatever else as just another opinion and they'd run a set of other opinions, pro and con -- well, that's okay if you're The New York Times, but people expect from a Jesuit magazine to get what is the Catholic view and why, and how do you answer these objections and so forth.

But anyway, so there were complaints. So what Ratzinger's office did is pass them over to the Jesuits. It's not for the Holy Office of the Catholic Church to decide. Give it to the Jesuits. It's their problem. And the Jesuits in Rome can give it to the Jesuits in America. Let them decide. They know what the state of play is. And if you follow European discussions these days, the new Europe is always discussing subsidiarity, which decisions belong to the individual states, which belong to the new federal Europe.

MR. DENIG: Let’s go to Austria.

QUESTION: Edith Grunwald, Austrian Press Agency. I have two questions. One is about (inaudible) also published about capitalism. What do you think about the development of capitalism nowadays in the United States, especially like tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich and cutting social programs for the poor, when you look at this from a Catholic perspective?

And my second question would be do you think that Cardinal Ratzinger is critical to the death penalty in the United States or do you think he anyway would accept it?

MR. NOVAK: We will -- on the death penalty, we will see. He was in some statements more cautious than John Paul II on the death penalty. That is, you cannot deny that the Catholic Church has approved of the death penalty all through its history.

QUESTION: Approved.

MR. NOVAK: Pardon?

QUESTION: You say it approved.

MR. NOVAK: Yes, it approved. It has always argued that there are certain crimes for which the only appropriate treatment is the death penalty. There are some violations of human decency and humanity so grave and so grievous that the person has cut himself from the human community, and not to execute the death penalty is not to take that crime seriously. It's to reduce it to the level of other crimes. It can be very rare. And the fact that you have a death penalty doesn't mean you have to use it. That's been the classical teaching until John Paul II.

And John Paul II, because of the nature of contemporary government -- who makes the decision about the death penalty? These days, it tends to be bureaucrats. The stage is a huge bureaucracy. It's not a king that you can hold responsible. If you go back and read St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, all his examples of the death penalty are the king. The mother comes and pleads before the king, "Spare my son. Yes, he committed murder, but he's a good boy and this is only one mistake that he made. Give him another chance," and so on. And then the king listens to the mother and then he has to make a decision. That's the sort of example that Aquinas gives.

But it's not like that anymore. And given what we have seen as a modern state in the 20th century, who can trust the state? I think that's the position that John Paul II was arguing. And then in addition to that, a second argument that he made is that we now are much wealthier societies so we can afford to isolate the people who commit horrific crimes so they won't be a danger to society. We can afford to keep them alive. And it would be more a mark of respect to them. The third argument is it'd be more a matter of respect to them not to have the death penalty. So here in the United States we have heard those arguments, too. And about half the states forbid the death penalty and about half approve of it. But the decision is made by people closest to the issue.

The Catholic bishops have announced that they are going to make condemnation of the death penalty a big priority over the next few years. There will be considerable argument in the Catholic community about that. Many will be for it and a good number will be opposed to it. It will be interesting what Benedict XVI has to say on this. The Catholic Catechism seems to reflect Benedict XVI's ideas better and it's a bit cautious on the death penalty. It does not go as far as John Paul II did in condemning it. So you've put your hand on a good question.

On capitalism, there's an argument going on here in America about whether Benedict XVI is more like most of the German clergy as a German Social Democrat and almost reflexively anti-capitalist. And on the other side, some people say, no, he perhaps was that way when he was younger, but he's become more observant of which systems help the poor to move out of poverty. For instance, China and India in the last 20 years have raised half a billion people -- one half a billion people -- out of poverty. Asia used to have the largest number of poverty in the world. It doesn't now. And now it's Africa. The share of the poor in Asia has been reduced under 10 percent, I think, if I remember the figures right, but very low. And they did this by adopting capitalist methods. So it's quite clear that capitalist methods are very good for raising up the poor out of poverty. And I think Cardinal Ratzinger sees that and understands that. Just as does Centesimus Annus, the encyclical letter of John Paul II, which is the clearest on that subject that we have.

And the last point I want to make is you used some slogans about tax cuts for the rich and cutting social programs for the poor that I think are left-wing canards and not accurate.

QUESTION: President Bush is not cutting taxes for the rich?

MR. NOVAK: No. I think he's cutting taxes for everybody. And if you pay more taxes, you're going to get a bigger tax cut. Well, that's perfectly normal, I think. But no, he is cutting tax rates across the board. That's what makes it work. Most of the people who create new business and new jobs are not the very rich; they're people much lower on the -- who will be the next generation's rich.

QUESTION: No, but I mean, for instance, in Austria, they had a debate, if people should work on Sundays, if shops should be open on Sundays, and the Austrian Catholic Church is always the strongest opponent because they say there should be limits on capitalism and that's actually something I refer to. And here in this country it looks like it's going the opposite way.

MR. NOVAK: Yeah, well, I'll be glad to talk. Look, there are lots of limits on capitalism. There are lots of things that should not be bought or sold ever. For example, if you are publishing a scientific journal and I want to publish an article in it, it would be hugely immoral for me to pay one of the judges to approve of my article so it would have peer review and be published. You cannot do that in science. You cannot buy scientific approval. That would be a horrible abuse.

You should not be able to sell body parts. That should be against the law. And there are many things that are against the -- we have in this country 31 feet of commercial law forbidding actions. I mean, you could fill that whole wall with commercial law saying what you cannot do. So you can't run a business these days without lawyers telling you what you can do and what you can't do. So sure, you should have law in regards to economic actions. There's no dispute about that. But how intelligent the laws ought to be is a second question.

Also, you should tax the rich, but which way do you actually get more tax money from the rich? I believe you can show, if you go back through Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, that after every so-called tax cut, the rich ended up paying a greater dollar amount and a bigger percentage of all taxes paid.

So I would say the Reagan tax cuts and the Bush tax cuts soaked the rich. They take more money from the rich and a greater proportion from the rich, but in a lower rates. And that makes the rich economically active and that's very good. They invest more and that's just the dynamism of the economy. I know they don't think this way in Austria or elsewhere, but that's the difference between social democrats and democratic capitalists.

QUESTION: No, for instance, in Austria the economic representatives say shops should be open on Sunday and then the bishops come and says shops should not be open on Sunday because the family is more important than the profit of the shop owner. And that has been a controversial debate, what we have since, I don't know, since years. The bishops say family values are more important than profit.

MR. NOVAK: They certainly are. Family values are more important than profit. But we've had that argument in the United States. It was Protestant Churches that used to have very strong Sabbath laws: Massachusetts, Pennsylvania. We called them "Blue Laws." You couldn't buy anything on Sunday. You couldn't get liquor on Sunday. For sure you can't even now, cannot now, either. But we had lots of those laws but they have lost out because you have a very strong percentage of the country that is not Christian, is not churched, is neither Catholic nor Protestant. And then you have a lot of Catholics and Protestants who are more or less lukewarm. You know, they are not so serious about what they do. So here the Catholic bishops would not be so strong as to be able to enforce that. And that's one reason they don't fight on that particular issue very much.

QUESTION: One short question?

MR. NOVAK: Yes.

QUESTION: What do you think about the role of religion in foreign policy? The reason why I ask you this question is in a recent symposium at AEI, one of your colleagues, who are said to be a neo-conservative like you, said religion has no role in neo-conservative foreign policy or neo-conservativism is a very hard thing to define these days.

But what you yourself think about the role of religion in foreign policy because, you know, after the demise of John Paul II, people said that he and Reagan ended the communist era and all those things.

MR. NOVAK: Well, this is a hard question to discuss. I mean, I can understand somebody saying "no role" to make a point, but I don't think you can take that literally. Because it's just a fact that because John Paul II was Polish, nothing could happen in Poland; you couldn't beat a priest with an iron pipe in Poland and get away with it. It would become known around the world because the Pope would call attention to it. Therefore, the Communist Party in Poland had to begin to behave and be careful, and that opened up more room for civic society and then also in the neighboring countries. And that's how John Paul II helped change the world -- just by throwing light, not by political actions, really.

And Ronald Reagan's way was much more political as he really built up the military and he convinced Gorbachev that we could have economic growth and still build up our military and be booming in the economy. They couldn't. If their military growth went up, their economy went down. And he proved that our economy was strong enough to beat them and our military would be strong. We were coming from behind. When Reagan became President, for the first time in history -- there was an argument about this -- but on balance, I think, the Soviets in decisive ways were ahead in nuclear weaponry. They had more ways of checkmating us than we had of checkmating them. I'm not going to go into a long discussion here. But by the time Reagan left office that was ended. And so Gorbachev then had to face the question: "Should we go on in a useless competition or shall we make the best bargain we can?"

And so Reagan's role was very different from the Pope's, but together they were very important -- each important to the other. One without the other, I'm not sure would have ended things quickly. But they're very different.

But also today, look, one reason why Americans are very active in Sudan is because religious people have been appalled at the suffering of Catholics and Protestants in Sudan and they've insisted on action from the government. So there are lots of issues in which religious people use the democratic system to bring attention to problems they care about, just like non-religious people do. And I think that's legitimate.

I don't think that when you think religiously about politics, there's only one way to think about it. I mean, even if men of good will agree that, for instance, on the question of taxes and poor, even if you agree to the principles, how do you best raise up the poor so there aren't getting any more poor? How do you best help the poor? We can agree. Conservatives and leftists can agree that that's the principle. But which method do you use? Do you raise tax rates on the rich? And what will happen if you do? Will that help the poor? Will it help the economy or won't it? There's room for argument about that.

So you might for religious reasons want to help the poor, but you would argue strenuously about which is the most effective way to do it. And so you have conservative religious people and progressive religious people arguing. I think it's wrong to bring religion under one side in that argument. And I don’t think that there's only one Christian solution to the taxation problem.

Even on the capital punishment argument, in a country this big, with the different kind of criminal problems that we have in different places, I don't think it would be right to say there's only one Christian solution to the capital punishment problem. I don't believe that. I think that Christians might well disagree about the solutions on that. In good faith, on both sides. They might not understand each other's form of Christianity, but you know, that's the way the world works.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) in foreign policy also?

MR. NOVAK: Yeah, in foreign policy --

QUESTION: (Inaudible.)

MR. NOVAK: Yeah, I think it's been part of the American character for many years that, to one degree or another, our Presidents have been religious people. If you go back and read Franklin Roosevelt's reasons for getting into World War II, they were, in part, religious and they were explicitly so. And Harry Truman, in his decision to oppose Communism in Greece, was partly religious. And Americans are religious and so they have to give a religious reason for what they do for almost everything. They may do it badly, but they wouldn't be quite true to themselves if they didn't do that.

MR. DENIG: Okay. I want to thank Mr. Novak very much for coming here, and ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation as well.